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May 18th, 2008
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Till the day I die

Johnny Winter lives and breathes the blues
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
May 7th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
He sits now when he plays, but Winter still cranks up some smokin' licks.
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Johnny Winter


When: Wednesday, May 14, at 8
Where: Lucerna Music Bar
Tickets: 770-1,430 Kč, available through Ticketpro, Ticketstream and at the venue
Last month, after a show in a Butte, Montana, roadhouse called the Silver Dollar Saloon, Johnny Winter’s band had people leaving the club marveling that Winter and crew “completely annihilated any notion that he’s lost a step.” To those who have followed Winter’s career, from his 1969 Columbia debut The Progressive Blues Experiment to his work with Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters, Winter’s credentials have never been in doubt.  
Born and bred in Beaumont, Texas, Winter plays with solid Delta leanings that have both musical and biographical substance. With the likes of the United Kingdom’s Eric Clapton and John Mayall dominating the charts in the late ’60s, it was Winter, along with the Allman Brothers, who landed the final American side chops that freed the blues of its candy coating of ’60s rock and pop.
Whereas the Allman Brothers lifted Stax horn blasts into duo guitar heights, Winter’s guitar work had its roots in his father’s employment on the same Stovall Plantation where Muddy Waters once worked. Beneath Winter’s precise fretwork, there rests the lyricism of field hollers combined with stunning technique that challenges even Jimi Hendrix’s mastery of the wah-wah effect. The electrifying composite of this silver-stringed scream and moan had U.S. record executives literally tripping over themselves to sign Winter in the late ’60s.
From the start, Winter sat side by side with rock ’n’ roll royalty like Hendrix, Stephen Stills and Dallas Taylor. As Winter recalls, “We would jam together at a club in New York called the Scene, owned by my former manager Steve Paul. There were some great times — all the top musicians would hang there.”
In the subsequent acclaim, both John Lennon and The Rolling Stones volunteered to pen tunes for Winter. Although it may seem strange that he would take secondhand British blues material, Winter defends the Rolling Stones, saying, “They have all kinds of blues music mixed into their sound. You can hear Muddy and Chuck Berry in Keith’s playing. … What inspired me in covering their music was their hooks and great songwriting all around.”
Winter was no slouch in the hook and song department himself. Nowhere is this better visible than in the 1994 documentary Woodstock Diaries, which, over two decades later, finally revealed Winters’ contribution to this seminal ’60s event. In retrospect, one has to wonder what the filmmakers were smoking when they clipped Winters’ set from the original Woodstock. His razor riffs and soaring fills on “Mean Town Blues” are far closer to timeless rock ’n’ roll than the dross of Sha-na-na that subsequent generations of Woodstock film watchers have had to endure.
In 1977, when Winter teamed up with Muddy Waters, the musical effect was nothing short of a blues aphrodisiac. As Winter laughingly tells The Prague Post, “Muddy said that the music we were making made his pee-pee hard.” With Waters’ late-’60s catalog drifting to everything from calculated novelty songs like the “Muddy Waters Twist” to the psychedelic miscalculations of “Electric Mud,” Winter and his manager’s independent Blue Sky recording label rescued the well-mannered Waters from the clueless wolves of the recording industry. At Blue Sky, there was one goal and one goal only: “I wanted to bring him back to the traditional sound he was known for,” Winter says.
The comeback was aptly named Hard Again. And, while it may have been the success of ’60s British blues that pushed Winter onto major labels, by the time he finished producing and playing on Waters’ second Blue Sky release, 1981’s King Bee, Winter stood solid in the 20th-century American blues canon.
In the 21st century, Winter still has more to offer. “I have just released a series of live CDs on Friday Music called the Live Bootleg Series, Volume 1 and 2, and there will be many more to come,” he says. “There’s a three-part DVD in the works on MVD which will contain live footage from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, which should also be out soon.”
For local concertgoers, the good news is that Prague is on Winter’s 2008 European tour schedule. “I have a great band now, which includes a fantastic guitarist, Paul Nelson, bass player Scott Spray and drummer Tony Beard.” And, for anyone wondering what else the future holds, Winter simply restates the obvious, followed by a laugh, saying, “I play nothing but the blues nowadays, and will continue till the day I die.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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